Books by Russell Williams
Writers have often been drawn to intoxication, from the legal highs of cigarettes, coffee and alc... more Writers have often been drawn to intoxication, from the legal highs of cigarettes, coffee and alcohol to the illegal highs of heroin, cocaine and ecstasy. Intoxication has not only been a way to aid creativity - literary writers have also explored and shaped our experiences of intoxication. In trying to write these altered states, they have made radical experiments to create works that mimic, and even induce, states of intoxication. This collection draws together a range of academics and writers to explore these states of intoxication and experiences of excess. It considers a wide variety of states of excess, moving from the possibilities of an intoxicated text to a critical account of the appropriation of excess within global capitalism.
The extreme is an essential aspect of contemporary experience. Thrill-seekers spend the weekend i... more The extreme is an essential aspect of contemporary experience. Thrill-seekers spend the weekend in the search for the adrenaline rush of extreme sports. In the political arena the world has begun to rediscover the split between the extreme left and the extreme right. Through 24-hour rolling news images of violence, torture and war are televised unremittingly into the living room. While the Internet places hardcore pornography, snuff film and cannibalism within easy reach of anyone with a personal computer or a smart-phone. The extreme has even become a quality companies seek to associate with the most banal of commodities such as ice cream and hair gel. These different manifestations of extremity suggest a contradictory, even paradoxical, relationship with the extreme. The contributors to this book explore how writing in French, from the Middle Ages to the present day, has interrogated extremity. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that the quality of the extreme can be applied to a great number of texts for different reasons and from myriad perspectives. Moreover, the extreme is revealed as a quality both distinct from and in tension with the crossing of boundaries associated with transgression. It is a movement towards and away from a centre of radiation that escapes cultural norms without necessarily reinforcing them. This sensation of rushing and wandering outside the boundaries of what is considered safe and normal provides the extreme with its adrenaline-charged response of excitement or horror. The analyses contained in this volume consider a number of manifestations of the extreme litteraire. The ambiguities of gender in medieval romance are explored in the context of the Arthurian court. The 19th century is examined through the prose poems of Baudelaire and the litterature sauvage of the Zutistes. The difficulties of writing the trauma of war and genocide in the 20th century are discussed through the work of Jorges Semprun and Agota Kristof. The contemporary extreme in French literature is examined in the autofiction of Christine Angot, the work of Annie Ernaux, Catherine Millet, the controversial novels of Michel Houellebecq, and the worldwide influence of the Marquis de Sade on writing today. Whilst the extreme litteraire may have a wide variety of expressions in French literature, it is always outside, beyond and far from the centre of our everyday experience. It shocks us, excites us and horrifies us, often all at once. This book seeks to provide an insight into how and why the extreme has fascinated, and continues to fascinate, the French literary imagination.
Book chapters/journal articles by Russell Williams
Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine/Critical Review of French Contemporary Fixxion, Jun 13, 2015
This article proposes a reading of Houellebecq’s work that highlights how his writing can be view... more This article proposes a reading of Houellebecq’s work that highlights how his writing can be viewed both as a comment on and a sincere homage to the French detective novel. It will take as its starting point the assertion in La Carte et le territoire (2010) that “Thierry Jonquet. En France c’est le meilleur, à mon avis”and suggests much of the novel – can be read as an intertextual reworking of aspects Jonquet’s œuvre. It equally considers Houellebecq’s novels from the perspective of their relationship to the conventions of the polar, such as prose style, and explores how his earlier narratives can equally be enlightened by an appreciation of the place of the genre in his work. It also suggests how theorist Jean Cohen’s work on crime fiction can deepen a critical understanding of the unsettling mood of Houellebecq’s fiction. It concludes that the pessimistic and unsatisfying effect created by Houellebecq’s partial engagement with the roman policier is symptomatic of his world view which is steeped in disappointment.
MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, Elizabeth Benjamin and Jessica Goodman (eds.), Vol. 9, 2014, pp. 67-83, Dec 20, 2014
Critics of contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq have frequently used the adjective ‘tr... more Critics of contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq have frequently used the adjective ‘transgressive’ in their descriptions of both the man and his work. There are, however, huge differences of both order and magnitude between the notion of transgression in the writing of the provocative novelist and that theorised systematically in the work of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, archetypical avatars of transgression. Houellebecq has even gone on record to declare his disgust at what he perceives as the synonymy between cruelty and transgression in their work and ‘transgressive’ visual art more broadly. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s fiction does display a constant preoccupation with both transgression and the transgressive: he is drawn to both the obscene and the unacceptable.
This article, which forms part of my ongoing research into the less canonical or less explored strands of Houellebecq’s work, considers the representation of both sex and transgressive contemporary visual art as represented in Houellebecq’s fiction. It demonstrates how Houellebecq’s writing maintains a critical dialogue with transgression, in particular in the work of the Vienna Actionists, Damien Hirst and, more implicitly, Jake and Dinos Chapman. It also touches on the author’s writing about art and his description of his own death, at the hands of a crazed art collector, in La Carte et le territoire (2010). As a result, it demonstrates how the image of a moralising author emerges in his work. It also considers how Houellebecq’s stance can be closely aligned with those of critics Ovidie and Paul Virilio. To conclude, it considers how the author formulates a specifically Houellebecquian notion of transgression, or an aesthetics to which art and writing should aspire, which resonates with the Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977).
Book Reviews by Russell Williams
New Statesman, May 28, 2015
An attentive reader of Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord, Manchette used his novels to offer d... more An attentive reader of Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord, Manchette used his novels to offer diagnoses of societal ills.
The Times Literary Supplement, Nov 2, 2012
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Books by Russell Williams
Book chapters/journal articles by Russell Williams
This article, which forms part of my ongoing research into the less canonical or less explored strands of Houellebecq’s work, considers the representation of both sex and transgressive contemporary visual art as represented in Houellebecq’s fiction. It demonstrates how Houellebecq’s writing maintains a critical dialogue with transgression, in particular in the work of the Vienna Actionists, Damien Hirst and, more implicitly, Jake and Dinos Chapman. It also touches on the author’s writing about art and his description of his own death, at the hands of a crazed art collector, in La Carte et le territoire (2010). As a result, it demonstrates how the image of a moralising author emerges in his work. It also considers how Houellebecq’s stance can be closely aligned with those of critics Ovidie and Paul Virilio. To conclude, it considers how the author formulates a specifically Houellebecquian notion of transgression, or an aesthetics to which art and writing should aspire, which resonates with the Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977).
Book Reviews by Russell Williams
This article, which forms part of my ongoing research into the less canonical or less explored strands of Houellebecq’s work, considers the representation of both sex and transgressive contemporary visual art as represented in Houellebecq’s fiction. It demonstrates how Houellebecq’s writing maintains a critical dialogue with transgression, in particular in the work of the Vienna Actionists, Damien Hirst and, more implicitly, Jake and Dinos Chapman. It also touches on the author’s writing about art and his description of his own death, at the hands of a crazed art collector, in La Carte et le territoire (2010). As a result, it demonstrates how the image of a moralising author emerges in his work. It also considers how Houellebecq’s stance can be closely aligned with those of critics Ovidie and Paul Virilio. To conclude, it considers how the author formulates a specifically Houellebecquian notion of transgression, or an aesthetics to which art and writing should aspire, which resonates with the Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977).
This paper will demonstrate, however, that focusing too greatly on these transgressions, paradoxically risks blinding Houellebecq's critics to the author's interest in the 'transgressive' with which his work maintains a complex critical dialogue. I will argue that Houellebecq's work should be read in terms of how it provides a critical commentary to the examples of hedonistic, transgressive culture it dramatises. These include, for example, the worlds of sadomasochism (Plateforme), contemporary visual art (Plateforme, La Carte et le territoire), the club échangiste (Les Particules élémentaires), and the world of celebrity (La Possibilité d'une île) all appear as key sites for Houellebecq's critique of contemporary permissive society. I will also demonstrate how these worlds function metaphorically within the novels, providing a platform for the Houellebecqian world view, where altruistic love is expected to prevail over transgressive cruelty, a dialectic element that critics of the scandalous in Houellebecq risk overlooking.
I will also demonstrate how such a reading of Houellebecq's work could have repercussions for the way critics talk about transgression. I will argue that Houellebecq's fiction opposes transgression as theorised by Bataille and Foucault, with a positive experience, closer to that explored by Roland Barthes in Fragments d'un discours amoreux and Alain Badiou in his Éloge de l'amour.
This paper will examine how Houellebecq's novels present the contemporary experience of 'madness of today'. I will argue that all of his fiction should be examined with regard to the way Houellebecq evokes the depressive experience as outlined by Sigmund Freud in 'Mourning and melancholia' and suggest there are subsequent implications for the way we read the racism and sexism in his work. I will also demonstrate that depression in Houellebebecq's novels reflects his critique of consumer society, and argue it is portrayed as an inevitable product of a world where desire is commodified, individuals are increasingly 'atomised' from each other and only the rich, young and beautiful are exempt.
I shall also consider the broader relationship between literature and depression explored by Houellebecq in 'Rester Vivant', an early theoretical essay, and consider the extent to which how art itself can provide a Schopenhaurian 'pas de côté', that offers a temporary respite from depression, a respite that contemporary psychoanalysis, according to Houellebecq, is ill-suited to provide.
Focussing on Morgiève and Hairmont’s novels, which have both been little-discussed from a critical perspective, this paper will explore the roles played in their fiction by subversive communities that inhabit enclosed spaces alongside or away from the mainstream in an extreme position to it. It will explore the relationship between these communities and the mainstream, and argue they assume a critical role in the fiction of both writers, the ‘extreme’ (in terms of both proximity and behaviour) providing a platform for criticism of society, fin-de-millénaire France for Morgiève, the contemporary Western world post credit-crunch for Hairmont.
This paper will argue, however, that the way he presents himself around his texts can be regarded as one of Houellebecq’s key transgressions; it the way in which he undermines the persona of contemporary author that has at least partially rendered him problematic from a critical perspective, causing him to be sneered at by some areas of the literary community.
This paper will establish Michel Houellebecq as a pan-disciplinary figure, and argue that, whilst best-known as a novelist, it is his extra-textual such his album of music (2001’s Présence Humaine), his filmmaking (2008’s La possibilité d'une île and 2002’s erotic short, La Rivière) that have clouded critical readings of his writing. I will also argue that Houellebecq’s media appearances, which have created a distinct media persona of a ‘contemporary transgressor’, mediated through the distinctly non-textual spaces of the TV chat show and the newspaper/magazine interview (and, increasingly the social media space) offer crucial insights into the way we read his work. I will also suggest that parallels can be drawn in this regard between Houellebecq and another key figure of provocation, Serge Gainsbourg.
I will also make reference to the ongoing dialogue between his work and other artistic arenas, particularly the world of contemporary visual art, which reaches an apex in 2010’s La Carte et le territoire.